A producer has scored a court victory over the members of the Monty Python comedy troupe. The Associated Press reports that Mark Forstater prevailed in a British court in a battle over royalties for "Spamalot," the stage musical based on the 1975 film "Monty Python and the Holy Grail."

Forstater brought the lawsuit against the Python troupe claiming he was a producer on the film, with his lawyers arguing that he should be treated as "the seventh Python" financially, the story says. At a hearing last year, Python member Michael Palin said that a seventh member of the group "was never going to be accepted by the Pythons."

"There were six of us. We were a tight group. We wrote our own material," Palin said.

But a judge ruled in favor of Forstater in his lawsuit against the five surviving Pythons. (Graham Chapman died in 1989.) The exact amount of the judgment will be decided in future hearings, the piece adds.

Forstater said that despite the lawsuit he still thinks the Pythons "are very funny."